An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Monday, September 9, 2013

The Labor Massacre in Paradise

National Guardsmen hold some of the 101 Filipino strikers arrested after the Hanapepe Massacre.

Regular
readers of this blog and those interested in labor history should not be surprised by yet another tale of
rampaging police and massacred strikers.From the Great Railway Strike of
1877 on for the next five or six decades such scenes repeated themselves
with variations outside besieged steel
mills, in mining towns stretching from West
Virginia to Colorado, and on
gritty urban streets.It was open class warfare and the victims of the
depredations by the hirelings of the bosses, gun thugs, vigilantes, Pinkertons, cops, and troops became martyrs, their stories preserved in song and legend.

We
don’t think of such things happening in paradise, but it did. On September 9,
1924 16 workers and four Sherriff’s officers were killed in what became known
as the Hanapepe Massacre.And the victims and their story have been
largely forgotten even by their own people.

Of
course what is now paradise of mainland tourists
was something different for the thousands of Filipino laborers who had been recruited for the sugar industry in the Hawaiian Islands.They cut cane and worked in sugar
processing, notoriously dangerous and exhausting work, on the massive plantations that were a mainstay of the
Territory of Hawaii’s economy.Moreover, they were at the bottom of an ethnic
pecking order in the industry.

TheFilipinos were the latest of three groups
imported by growers to work the fields after native Hawaiians proved unsuitable
and unwilling to do the back breaking labor.First were the Chinese, but
the Oriental Exclusion Act which
came into force on the islands when they were annexed to the United States in
1898 cut off the source of coolies. Growers
turned to theJapanese who arrived mostly in family groups and had well developed
cultural ties and institutions.By 1909
they were conducting their first strikes for better wages and conditions and in
1920 organized the Federation of
Japanese Labor, which carried out another big strike on Oahu that year.

With
the Japanese increasingly restless, employers turned to the U.S. colony of The Philippines to recruit more plaint labor.Workers were recruited from three distinct
areas of the islands, Visayans, Ilocanos,
and, in much smaller numbers, Tagalogs,
each group speaking a different language.Unlike the Japanese, most of the recruits
were young single men and illiterate.Both the bosses and the Japanese regarded them as rustic primitives.

The
first waves arrived during or just after the 1909 strike and their numbers
swelled each year.By 1924 there were an
estimated 37,000 Filipinos out of a total population of 323,600 in the
Territory, scattered over the sugar producing islands of Oahu, the Big Island of Hawaii, Maui, and Kauai. On arrival they were given the
hardest, lowest status jobs, housed in the worst conditions, and given basic
rations hardly enough to survive on.Anything additional and services like laundry had to be paid for at company stores at inflated prices.

Despite
their outcast status and the fact that the Japanese ethnic based union refused
to enlist them, many Filipino workers walked off their jobs during the 1920
strike as well.

A Pablo Manlapit young Honolulu attorney, one of the few
Filipinos who had worked his way out of the cane fields of the Big Islands to professional
status, organized the Filipino Labor
Union, which was essentially confined to Oahu, unlike the territory-wide
Japanese union.Manlapit, a minority
Tagalog, had helped organize the Filipino walk out in 1920.By 1924 he felt his union was ready for a
push for High Wage Movement in
support of demands he had made of the Hawaiian
Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA),beginning two years earlier.The ambitious agenda included doubling the
minimum wage from $1 a day to $2, an eight-hour workday—down from 10 to 12
hours—and overtime pay, equal pay between men and women, and collective
bargaining rights.

For
their part, growers, who controlled the Territorial Government, had responded
to increased militancy by both Japanese and Filipino by following the mainland
in enacting draconian anti-labor laws during the post-World War I Red Scare period.The Territorial Legislature passed the Criminal Syndicalism Law of 1919, Anarchistic Publications Law
of 1921, and the Anti-Picketing Law
of 1923.Despite penalties of up to
ten years in prison, the severity of the reaction only fueled worker discontent.

In
April of 1924 Manlapit called an all Island strike against the growers.

The
Japanese Union also struck, but did not coordinate its activity with the
Filipinos.By this time the Filipinos
were the majority of the work force and the Japanese were concentrated in the
more skilled jobs. On their part, the Japanese with their well-established
system of union branches on all of the Islands and at most of the major
plantations and sense of communal solidarity were able to effectively bring
most of their work force out.

Manlapit’s
Filipino Union did not fare so well.Barely organized outside of Oahu, the union chief contented himself with
making speeches and holding rallies on the other islands calling on the workers
to join the walk out.Although the
rallies were well attended and he received an enthusiastic welcome, he did not
provide local workers with organizers, structural support, or even much of a
plan.The result was predictably disastrous.On Kauai only 575 Filipino laborers out of more
than 5,500 employed at the Koloa, Makaweli, Kekaha, Lihue and
McBryde Sugar Co. plantations actually walked out.

Strikers
on the island set up headquarters in the only two towns not on plantation
property or controlled by the growers.At
Hanapepe about 124 active strikers set up a strike headquarters in a Japanese
school building which they rented.

The
strike dragged on through the spring and summer with most of the action on
Oahu.Without leadership or a clear plan
militant worker on Kauai grew increasingly frustrated—and hungry.They had to rely on fishing and modest
charity by local merchants to survive.Meanwhile most of their fellow Filipinos stayed on the job and
production at the plantations was hardly effected.

For
their part plantation owners responded predictably with armed thugs, the
National Guard, and strike breakers paid a higher wage than the strikers
demanded. Strikers were turned out of their homes. Propaganda was distributed to
whip up racist reaction among white and native Hawaiian populations and to
further divide Filipino from Japanese workers.

Tensions
boiled over on September 7 when two non-striking workers, both 18 year-old
ethnic Ilocanos bicycled into Hanapepe looking to buy shoes.They were captured by strikers from the
school building almost all ethnic Visayans, held against their will and
beaten.

Deputy Sheriff William Crowell went to the
headquarters when he heard reports of the incident and demanded the release of the
two young men.The strikers produced
them, but under compulsion the men said that they were there voluntarily. Crowell
left unconvinced and went to the county
attorney.Arrest warrants were sworn not for the strikers, but for the
captives, as a way to free them.

Crowell
returned the following morning with other officers and a posse of about 40 men, any of them company guards or employees
armed with hunting rifles paid for by the HSPA.Crowell and three or for regular deputies approached the school and
served the warrant.The rest of the
posse was positioned behind a line of automobiles on the road and high on a
hill overlooking the school.

Strikers
surrendered the two young men.But as
Crowell and his men began to leave with them, striker poured from the school
cursing and following the men.Many had
their cane cutting bolo knives, a
kind of Filipino machete.At this point accounts of what happened varywidely.According to authorities, Crowell and his men
came under attack and sharpshooters on the hill and behind the automobiles let
loose and intense fusillade of rifle fire that lasted several minutes.

Surviving
unionists insisted that although they were pressing on the Sherriff’s men, no
one was assaulted until firing began.This view as been somewhat corroborated by non-striking local residents
who witnessed the shooting, but their account has been challenged because they
were thought to be sympathetic to the strikers.At least one of the members of the posse later testified that he and his
fellow opened fire when they thought that Crowell would come under
attack.

No
one will ever know for sure.

But
after about 15 minutes of confused fighting, 16 strikers lay dead, dozens were
wounded, and four deputies were stabbed to death.Crowell and others were wounded but
survived.The posse and National Guard
troops arrested all of the strikers they could find.

In
Honolulu, where strike leader Manlapit was already in custody for unrelated
strike charges, the victims of the shooting got no sympathy.Neither the rest of the Hawaiian labor
movement, mostly concentrated on the docks, responded with sympathy or
solidarity.And after a day or two of
screaming headlines on the Mainland, the incident was quickly forgotten there,
too.

The
Filipino dead were packed in cardboard caskets and buried together in an
unmarked slit trench, the location of which has been lost.The Sheriff’s men were buried with the pomp
reserved for military heroes.

Of
course the strike was broken and the Filipino union was smashed.101 strikers from Hanapepe were brought to
trial.According to Tiffany Hill in an article on the massacre in Honolulu Magazine, “57
strikers received 13 months in jail, and returned to work afterward.
Seventy-six were indicted on riot charges—16 were acquitted—and two were
charged with assault and battery for beating the two Ilocanos; nobody was
charged with murder. Most received four-year prison sentences, and some were
deported back to the Philippines.”

Manlapit
was also deported to the Philippines after a prison sentence, but returned in
1932.He tried to organize a new
multi-ethnic sugar worker’s union with little success.Small scale local strikes in 1933 failed to
attract many non-Filipino workers and the new attempt petered out before any
wide spread strike was again attempted.

Sugar
workers on the islands were not organized until the post-World War II when the International
Longshoremen and Warehouse Union (ILWU)
finally was recognized as the collective
bargaining agent and won many of the demands of the High Wage Movement and
the Filipino Union.

Today
the sugar industry has all but vanished from the islands and the Hanapepe
Massacre is largely forgotten.Even
among Filipinos, it was not until the 1970s that ethnic writers and historians
began to investigate this buried part of their heritage.